A few days ago, I listened to President Trump’s speech to the American people. I thought he was trying too hard to make a sale.
I then reflected, but only very briefly, on the Caux Round table’s advocacy of “discourse” as a fundamental moral parameter for good public governance. With Trump’s speech in mind, I wondered if we need to add to our recommendation more definition. Just what is moral discourse?
As a child, I heard the common American saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute” or “There’s one born every minute.” In junior high school, I think, I first read Mark Twain’s allegorical novel about Americans – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I took it as a call to be self-reliant and curious, but also as a warning to always be on your guard.
The novel has Huck Finn and his friend, Jim, run into two traveling salesmen, who it quickly becomes clear are con men profiting from duping the kind and the decent – but gullible – among us.
One presents himself and performs as the king of France, the pretender to the throne and his sidekick passes himself off as the duke of Bridgewater. The king is persuasive, smooth-talking and opportunistic. He sells The Royal Nonesuch (a fake theatrical performance which will come to town) and the Wilks inheritance, where he pretends to be an English heir selling a false claim to an estate.
Twain uses these satirical fictional characters to expose gullibility, greed and moral blindness on the part of naïve and well-intentioned, small-town and provincial Americans.
In real life, there was P.T. Barnum, who ran a traveling circus going from town to town making money by selling entertaining acts and the chance to see unusual animals. He is remembered for advising: “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public” and “No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
In the December 19 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Eptsein published his assessment of Donald Trump as very much in this American tradition of traveling salesmen, who might be just con men. Epstein’s take on Trump is that he is a slick salesman with big claims and few deliverables.
Here are excerpts from Epstein’s essay:
President Trump’s recent commercials for Trump wristwatches have caught my attention. In one commercial, three watches are shown, one with a red face between the other two. All three have the name Trump on them. Mr. Trump wears the red-faced watch and urges us to buy one, which, along with putting money in his pocket, would show support for him and his movement.
I don’t know for certain if a president’s selling his own merchandise is unprecedented, but it strikes me as extraordinary. A billionaire, he surely doesn’t need the money. What I suspect he does need is the action. A real estate man, builder though he has been, he is also a salesman. My guess is that it’s through selling, closing the deal, that he gets his true kicks.
Mr. Trump seems to me a particular kind of salesman – the kind once known as a “borax man.” In the Chicago of my youth, a borax man was an especially slick salesman, aggressive and relentless, usually specializing in home-improvement products. These improvements didn’t improve anywhere near so thoroughly as the borax man promised. The term derives from the white crystalline powder used in cleaning, soldering, glass making and in pesticides, which in centuries past was sold as a cure-all. Soon it came to mean tawdry and second-class goods. …
Mr. Trump has been called a fascist, an authoritarian, a dictator and more. None of these terms has seemed to me anywhere near a good fit. All are too elevated. Mr. Trump, not the most learned of men, may never have even heard of some of these words before he was called them. A borax man seems a finer, near-perfect fit.
As a borax man, Donald Trump is attempting to sell the greatest of all products: the promise to return America to its former greatness. Like all borax men, he doesn’t really deliver the product.…
Like the good borax man that he is, Mr. Trump is always congratulating himself, telling Americans about all the good things he has done for them – with lots more on the way. My father used to say that a salesman first has to sell himself. Mr. Trump attempts to do this, hiring only cabinet members who will flatter him, over and over again telling us of all the wars he’s stopped, the economic growth he’s caused, the crime he’s prevented. Boraxian.
I find it helpful to think of our president as a slick and aggressive salesman. His modus operandi generally is better understood when he is so considered. His claims are more easily examined and, often necessarily, refuted when understood as coming from a high-pressure salesman. Doing so also clears away, at least for me, any remaining aspects of Trump derangement syndrome. I intend to view him as the ultimate borax man for the remainder of his time in office and I invite you to do likewise.